10 Year Old Learns The Hard Way America Has No Free Market!

Life imitates the Simpsons: a 10 year old New Yorkgirl has been fined $50 for operating a lemonade stand without a license.

Clementine Lee set up a lemonade stand in Riverside Park, New York Saturday as a way to raise some pocket money, but that was before not one, but three city officials pounced on her illegal operation.
“I was kind of nervous, and I also really felt bad because I didn’t know I was doing something against the law,” Clementine told local media. “They made me feel really, really bad, and scared at the same time,” Clemetine said. “We could have gotten into really big trouble and gotten arrested or something.”

A spokesperson for the New York Parks Department says that the three agents “showed poor judgment” (you think so?) and that the ticket will be dismissed.

For the record, Clementine had managed to sell $19 worth of lemonade before being slapped with the $50 fine.

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So the agents showed poor judgement but the fact remains that the agents were acting according to the law and therefore there is such a law and it was the circumstances of the case that caused such public shame that they took the easy way out and in this case blamed the officers. I blame the politicians who passed the law in the first place! A law most likely passed to protect other businesses from competition rather than the public at large but I'm sure it won't take much to convince the non-thinking public that the lemonade in question posed a health risk because it lacked proper testing or rather the young girl had failed to prove to the State she was capable of making a pitcher of lemonade!

Ah but the good news is the State creates it's own enemies and I'd say a certain 10 year old just got her first lesson on opposing state monopoly economics and what the Matrix really is!

“I agree with you. It isn't the free market that is the problem”. In my quote I said: "Unbridled capitalism destroys diversity, competition etc. not the free market". There is a tendency to confuse FREE MARKET with CAPITALISM and I don't understand how this can be. Free market is probably as ancient as humanity itself whereas Capitalism is only as old as the existence of surplus capital. Nobody had any surplus capital to invest as early as the 1600. Before that maybe a few families, the Medici and the Rothschild’s, had enough surplus capital to lend to kings and queens, but 99.99% of the European, not to mention the world population, had no surplus capital to invest.

Capitalism is NEW! And we are still learning what happens when it is left unchecked.

In my book I make the case for a “civic economy” that promotes entrepreneurship. I believe that one million small businesses employing 2 people each is better that one business employing 2 million people. This is because if that one big business goes bust the economy looses two million jobs. Do I advocate smallness? No. Certain businesses have to be big for scale reasons. But to have all the chicken in the USA produced by one company, or the beef, the cars and the software would be suicidal. Fortunately in the USA there are anti trust laws that protect us from unbridled capitalism. And to be protected from it we desperately need because we cannot allow the free market to be destroyed whether by communism OR by unbridled capitalism.